Tag: Small Business

Boomi Widgets–Another Step Towards Simplifying Application Integration

Over the past few years, the SaaS  subscription model has given small and medium businesses  (SMBs) a much easier, more affordable and manageable route to deploy and use business applications. But integrating these applications isn’t always as easy as deploying them. Although things such as Web services and service-oriented-architecture (SOA) technologies promised to alleviate the situation, th...

Intuit Partner Platform: Changing the Rules of Cloud Platforms with Federated Applications

Cloud platforms, or “platforms-as-a-service” (PaaS) are quickly becoming a key channel for application developers. By writing and publishing their applications to integrate with those of a major PaaS provider, such as Salesforce.com or Microsoft, smaller developers can gain instant access to a large installed base of customers. With so many vendors creating their own clouds, however, it’s easy...

IBM Lotus Foundations: A Real Choice for Small Businesses and Partners

As I mentioned in a blog I posted after Lotusphere 2009, IBM Lotus has been reluctant to go head to head with obvious rivals, particularly Microsoft. At Lotusphere, however, the company came out swinging, declaring intentions “shatter Windows” and “change desktop economics” with Symphony, the free Lotus desktop suite, and compete aggressively against Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) with t...

Impressions from Sage Insights 2009

Last week, I attended Insights, Sage North America’s annual partner event. I’ve attended this event for several years now, watching the company’s attempts to create a cohesive brand and strategy across its many small and medium business (SMB)  solutions. At last year’s Insights, Sage had just hired Sue Swenson

Managed Services: Dell’s Next Disruption?

What do you get when you combine an industrial-strength managed services platform, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) desktop management solution, and a hardware vendor that transformed the PC and server industries with its direct, Internet sales model? The answer is Dell’s ProManage Managed Services, which is built on Dell’s ...

Will CPAs Bring the Cloud to Earth for SMBs?

Just last week, I blogged about how some IT pundits and vendors are falling into the trap of turning the cloud into yet another confusing and over-hyped industry buzzword, and the need to bring cloud conversations down to earth for small and medium business (SMB) customers. A couple of days after I wrote this post, I had a briefing with Intacct, the American Institute of Certified Public Acco...

Meet MrTed

Those of you that follow me on Twitter and read some of the reports I’ve written over the years know I’m very interested free software-as-service (SaaS) offerings, and how companies that take this approach plan to monetize their free services. Last week, I had a briefing with Jerome Ternynck, the CEO of MrTed, which has be...

Demandbase—Can it Turn Your Web Traffic Into Treasure?

Like most analysts, my schedule is usually chockfull of briefings from vendors. Some of these are boring, some are interesting, and once in a blue moon, a vendor comes along with a solution that everyone should know about. Demandbase (www.demandbase.com) is one of these solutions. I initially came across the vendor late last fall, when I was judging for the Destination CR...